John Bulmer Hobson was born on 14 January 1883 in Belfast and died on 8 August 1969 in Castleconnell, County Limerick. Unusually for an Irish revolutionary he actually came from a Protestant family. His family were Quakers, which is a…
Category: Biographies
Short biographies of famous figures in Irish history, both on site and linking to other websites.
A Short Biography of John Bulmer Hobson:
When Rangoon Defended an Irishman Challenging the British Empire
(A guest post by Dr. Laurence Cox of the National University of Ireland Maynooth) On a Friday 13th in 1911, the colonial Chief Court of Rangoon tried and failed to put an Irishman on trial for sedition. The problem wasn’t…
An Irish Buddhist agitator in Burma:
filming a different kind of anti-colonialism
(A guest post by Dr. Laurence Cox of the University of Maynooth, Ireland) On Saturday March 2nd 1901, a barefoot Irishman confronted an off-duty Indian police officer at the Shwedagon pagoda in colonial Rangoon, challenging his right to walk there…
Who was Felix Park?
Nowadays, of course, there’s Irish History Compressed to deal with these kinds of annoyances!
Evelyn Waugh’s view of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Bill
On 5 August 1920, Evelyn Waugh, then a schoolboy aged 16, went to visit the Houses of Parliament on the invitation of John Molson MP, father of one of his schoolfriends. He managed to get in to witness part of…
Roger Casement: traitor and hero
I just spotted a new article on the BBC’s website about Roger Casement, so I thought I’d link to it. The main ‘thesis’ is as follows: Author Angus Mitchell, who has written several books on Casement, believes he was not…
Dark Pages – Roger Casement and the Black Diaries
Here‘s a link to an article on Roger Casement and the infamous ‘Black Diaries’. The author doesn’t offer an opinion on the much-debated subject of their authenticity. What’s interesting is the analysis of how Casement has been portrayed in literature:…
Reposted: Patrick Pearse: A Short Biography
The intellectual leader behind the Easter Rising of 1916, Pearse, born 10 November 1879, had qualified as a lawyer but his interests ranged widely beyond that. He was a proponent of both the revived Irish language and educational reform; combining…
Reposted: Michael Collins: a short biography
Michael Collins was born in County Cork on 16 October 1890, and worked as a young man for several years in London, where he joined the secret society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After returning to Ireland in 1915 he fought…
Reposted: Éamon de Valera: a short biography
Éamon De Valera was born 14 October 1882 in New York to a Cuban father and an Irish mother, but returned to live with relatives in Bruree, County Limerick, as a small child. He studied mathematics and worked as a…